Quotes from Michael Moorcock

I had this funny family. At one end, they were breeding dogs in south-east London - for greyhound racing - and at the other, my uncle was living in Downing Street. And I would actually go to Downing Street, which didn't strike me as funny. I'd get on the number 15 bus.

I really did have a very egalitarian upbringing.

I'd started doing fanzines from the age of nine. I'd been doing as many copies as you can get carbon paper into an upright typewriter, and I'd try to sell them at school.

All Empires fall, All ages die, All strife shall be in vain. All Kings go down, All hope must fail, But Tanelorn remains Our Tanelorn remains.

I have a kind of innate sense of structure, which also makes me a good mimic.

Because I had sought to challenge Destiny, Destiny had taken vengeance.

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful.

Here, I thought, I had found the human race in its final stages of decadence perverse, insouciant, without ambition. And I could not blame them. After all, they had no future.

I think of myself as a bad writer with big ideas, but I'd rather be that than a big writer with bad ideas.

What happened to fantasy for me is what also happened to rock and roll. It found a common denominator for making maximum money. As a result, it lost its tensions, its anger, its edginess and turned into one big cup of cocoa.

Time is the enemy of identity

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

And now, Elric had told three lies. The first concerned his cousin Yyrkoon. The second concerned the Black Sword. The third concerned Cymoril. And upon those three lies was Elric's destiny to be built, for it is only about things which concern us most profoundly that we lie clearly and with profound conviction.

The book trade invented literary prizes to stimulate sales, not to reward merit.

Treasures are not won by care and forethought but by swift slaying and reckless attack.

Farewell, friend. I was a thousand times more evil than thou!

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.

For this was the other thing that Elric knew: that to compromise with Tyranny is always to be destroyed by it. The sanest and most logical choice lay always in resistance.

We must be bound to one another then," Elric murmured despairingly. "Bound by hell-forged chains and fate-haunted circumstance. Well, then—let it be thus so—and men will have cause to tremble and flee when they hear the names of Elric of Melinbone and Stormbringer, his sword. We are two of a kind—produced by an age which has deserted us. Let us give this age cause to hate us!

There was no more dangerous kind of madman than one who devoted a good brain and a courageous heart to unhealthy ambitions.

When gods die, self-respect buds', murmured Orland Fank. 'Gods and their examples are not needed by those who respect themselves and, consequently, respect others. Gods are for children, for little, fearful people, for those who would have no responsibility to themselves or their fellows.

I walk the moonbeam roads a silver web connecting the many worlds of the Multiverse.

By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.

Our scientific advances will be merely obscene unless they help the large part of our world's population emerge from miserable uncertainty and debilitating terror.